The second tour of the urban open world is about to start playing the finals!
Which round of the two-dimensional game war has been fought?
At the end of 2024, the answer to this question will undoubtedly be the urban open world theme.
The two-dimensional track is bloody this year, and today it is still insisting on the track of the urban open world, none of which is a weak team, all the project teams are racing against time, and they all want to book the popular quota in 2025, and if they are a little behind, they may miss this opportunity. And today (December 5th), NetEase's two-dimensional open world project "Infinity" has also officially ended, announcing the latest actual video and openly recruiting offline trials.
A week ago, on November 29, "Infinity", which had been silent for a year, released a teaser video, removing the word "codename" before the name of the project, and officially named it "Infinity". Players are predicting new moves in the game, which has been in closed development for a year.
However, after a year, the market has changed, and players' tastes have been further improved, and the requirements for the game are no longer limited to how big the map is and how high the benefits are, but pay more attention to the novelty and innovation of the game. For the Infinity project, how will it respond to this trend and how will it meet the changing tastes of players? Perhaps from the actual machine video, we can get a glimpse or two.
A city that breathes is more than big
Although the video of "Infinity" is not long, the amount of information revealed is not small at all. The first thing that strikes you in the video is that the city is really big in the game. As you can see from the video, this is a large city built by the sea, with long sea-crossing bridges and highways around the city all around the city, forming a dense road network.
The video then shows a rich urban scene. There are quiet city parks where players can try their hand at skateboarding, basketball and other sports, there are hot beach areas where players can have a fierce beach volleyball duel, and there are glorious sky bars where players can sing and dance to wash away the smell of the day.
In addition to the outdoor scenes, the video also shows many indoor activity scenes, including fitness exercises, casual dining, darts, mahjong, etc., which are very rich and diverse. The scenes shown in these videos are likely to correspond to corresponding interactive mini-games, allowing players to interact with NPCs, and may even support real-time interaction between players and online parties.
In last year's first exposed video, the project team said that "Infinity" will try to open up the indoor space as much as possible to create a realistic enough open world for players. Judging from the video a year later, the project team is trying to fulfill the promise of that year, not only to make the city large enough, but also to add enough rich details to the city.
However, the expansion of urban areas also comes with a new problem, which is that players will be more dependent on transportation to move between maps.
In the video, the game already shows several ways to get around. The most used vehicles are undoubtedly driving, but there are also more nimble single-person vehicles for more complex road conditions. Among them, the most anticipated is undoubtedly the movement mode that uses hook locks to fly between buildings. If you can move in this way, you will definitely be able to play a lot of tricks.
In addition to this, we also noticed that there is a public transport system in the city. If the production team delivers on its promise of "what you see is what you get", everything that is visible in the game can be realized. Then there is reason to believe that in the world of "Infinity", public transportation facilities such as subways, light rails, buses, and taxis are not simply environmental decorations, but can be truly ridden and become a means of transportation for players.
To achieve the above design, the workload of the project team will definitely increase a lot. However, if you want to create a city that is so real that it feels like you can breathe, you need to pay attention to these details. And it can be seen from this video that "Infinity" has indeed done a lot of work and polished a lot of details for the carving of urban details.
Diverse battles, infinite reverie
To make the scale of the city itself bigger and the details to be done well is actually just to complete the work of building the stage. What kind of drama to be staged on this stage is another key to the success or failure of products with such themes. In this regard, Infinity also reveals a lot of information in the new video.
In this game, players will take on the role of an investigator dealing with various paranormal events in the city. This is the worldview of the game that has been set at the time of the first exposure. In this video, we can already see a variety of gameplay derived from this world view.
In terms of combat, the game takes many forms. There are not only sword melee duel battles, but also scenes with long-range output of firearms, and you can also see the gorgeous ultimate performance of superpower characters. It can be seen that the diversity of combat in this game is not only reflected in the flexibility of character positioning, but also in the richness and diversity of combat modes, bringing players more freedom of choice.
In the video, I noticed that this game has a new way of fighting that is different from other games: it can use the environment to interact with each other.
Regarding the interaction of the scene, "Infinity" was shown in the first exposure of the game: the character can use his superpowers to move or throw objects in the scene. At that time, many players just saw this interaction as a spice when exploring the city, but they didn't expect the project team to develop new gameplay ideas around the interaction.
In the new video, scene interaction is not limited to simply shifting or destroying objects in the scene, players can also use scene items to assist themselves in combat, making them an integral part of attack and defense. In the video, a character can be seen using a roadside tire to trap enemy soldiers, restricting the enemy's movement.
There are a lot of ways to play around this interaction, and it's hard to think about. is like the classic joke: "No one can beat Jackie Chan in Furniture City." "Does Infinity want to bring more environmental elements into the combat process, so that the battle is no longer a superpower dump outside the city streets, but a real street fight?
If the open world with a fantasy background needs to introduce gameplay rules such as elemental reactions, then the open world with an urban theme needs to make use of all the common items in the city, so that players can feel that this is a "city"!
If you can interact freely with the environment during the battle, then the battles in Infinity will definitely become very special and urban. If you follow this line of thought, there is no limit to the possibilities of open-world gameplay: for example, you can use a dumpster to build a Gundam to assist in battle. Whether such a brain hole can be realized depends on how open the open world of "Infinity" can be.
In addition to the interactive experience of environmental elements, another thing worth looking forward to in this game may be driving. There isn't much of a boss fight in this video, but there is a rampaging vehicle in the video that stands out. Obviously, this is not an ordinary vehicle, but a mutant boss-level monster. If you want to hunt it down, then a fierce city chase battle may be inevitable.
In the video, we can see characters shooting while driving, characters using their abilities to grab street objects in cars, and characters standing on the roof of the car to withstand the impact...... From these details, it can be speculated that this game will not only have a car chase battle, but also may have a variety of interactive combat methods in the chase battle.
For an urban game, it's undoubtedly exciting to be able to invest production resources in this kind of high-speed sports combat. It's just that we can't tell from the video alone whether these contents are plot performance clips, or if the players themselves can trigger similar gameplay during daily exploration. Freedom to drive is great, of course, but chasing or escaping will undoubtedly add a lot of fun.
What is the fight for bayonets in the second tour of the city?
As a blockbuster product of NetEase's entry into the two-dimensional open world, "Infinity" has attracted more attention since its first exposure. However, compared to the high expectations of players, the "Infinity" project team is relatively low-key, and it took a year of closed-door development to release new information and announce the arrangement of the first offline trial today.
Obviously, like many two-dimensional project teams, the "Infinity" project team is also somewhat idealistic, always trying to shape their world perfectly enough to show the player, and do not hesitate to spend more time and resources on it.
However, time waits for no one, and the Urban Open World track is now in the finals. Idealism is something that every team has, and in the end, it's all about development efficiency and understanding of the future. Whoever can produce more content in the same amount of time, and who can better predict future trends and make content that players have not yet thought of, will win this final. In terms of development efficiency, Infinity is undoubtedly the first echelon, and the changes in the game this year are enough to prove this, and the rich content is enough to verify the competitive potential of the game. As for whether the game's prediction of the future is accurate, this needs to be truly brought to the player and verified by the player.
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